The Grand American Tradition of
Threat Inflation

This war is different than the other wars we’ve been in. If we leave, they will follow us here.

—President George W. Bush, defending the Iraq surge, October 2006

In March 1947, less than two years after the bloodiest conflict in human history, President Harry Truman faced a herculean political task—convincing Americans to go back on a war footing. Tensions between the United States, its Western allies, and the Soviet Union were rising. Soviet support for communist rebels in Turkey and Greece had become a rising flashpoint between the two sides. The British government, which had been picking up the bill for economic and military aid to both governments, informed the U.S. State Department that it could no longer shoulder the responsibility and needed the United States to step in. In effect, the torch of global hegemony—and anticommunism—was being passed from the British Empire to the United States.

Truman wanted $400 million ($4.4 billion in today’s dollars) from Congress to assist the two countries and prevent the “collapse of free institutions and loss of independence” in the face of Soviet interference. Americans, however, were exhausted by war, and Congress had little appetite for sinking more resources into overseas entanglements. The chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Sen. Arthur Vandenberg, reportedly gave Truman the best advice he could muster for how to win Americans’ support: “scare hell out of the country.”1 The president willingly complied.

Appearing before a joint session of Congress, Truman told the American people, “nearly every nation must choose between alternative ways of life”: Soviet-sponsored communism or U.S.-backed freedom. To counter potential communist gains in southeastern Europe, Truman evoked the specter of an inevitable spread of communism to all corners of the globe. In what soon would be labeled the “Truman Doctrine,” the president offered a groundbreaking and all-encompassing vision for U.S. foreign policy that would, in time, come to form the foundation of postwar American politics. “It must be the policy of the United States,” said Truman, “to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.”²

To sell this radical peacetime change in America’s role in the world, Truman took dramatic license. He argued that “totalitarian regimes imposed upon free peoples, by direct or indirect aggression, undermine the foundations of international peace, and hence the security of the United States. The free peoples of the world look to us for support in maintaining their freedoms. If we falter in our leadership, we may endanger the peace of the world. And we shall surely endanger the welfare of this nation.”³ Rather than talk about U.S.-Soviet rivalry in geopolitical terms, Truman turned the superpower conflict into an ideological and existential one.

Truman’s stark speech, combined with an expansive public relations effort, worked. Public opinion polling showed that a majority of citizens supported the spending request. Vandenberg quickly shepherded it through Congress, where it passed by one hundred votes in the House and forty-four in the Senate.4 Even after signing the legislation, Truman continued defending it as essential to protecting the American homeland, telling a New York Times columnist, “If Russia gets Greece and Turkey, then they would get Italy and France and the iron curtain would extend all the way to Western Ireland. In that event we would have to come home and prepare for war.”⁵

The Political Tradition of American Vulnerability

Truman’s speech had enormous long-term consequences for U.S. foreign policy and American politics. It created a narrative of fear that defined post–World War II America. From the “missile gap” of the late 1950s to claims made during the Vietnam War that if the communists won in Southeast Asia, then America should “throw in the towel in the area and pull back our defenses to San Francisco,” to campaign ads in 1984 warning of Soviet bears in American forests, threat inflation became an essential tool for selling an internationalist—and interventionist—foreign policy to the American people. After the Soviet Union disappeared, however, threat inflation did not fade away. It found new targets and narratives, most pungently in the Bush administration’s evoking of the terrifying image of mushroom clouds over American cities to justify the war in Iraq.⁶

Many of the foreign threats detailed in this chapter were not, at the time, illusory or fabricated by government officials, military leaders, or media commentators. Throughout much of the Cold War, the threat of superpower conflict was real, and Soviet gains had the potential to undermine America’s political and economic interests. What was deceptive, however, were the depictions of urgency and potential severity that these threats allegedly represented. During the Cold War and long after, threats to America never seemed to decrease in likelihood or consequence. Instead, Americans and their way of life only became more at risk and more susceptible to intimidation by overseas dangers. The players might have changed—from communists and terrorists to undocumented immigrants and gang members today—but the game remained the same.

This habitual foreign-threat inflation is a combination of the political and the parochial. For Republicans, saying that the world is a bubbling cauldron of potential hazards played to the party’s traditional political advantage on national security issues—one that dates back to the earliest years of the Cold War. (Ironically, before Pearl Harbor, Republicans were seen as the party of isolationism and the most strident opponents of U.S. military involvement in World War II.)

For Democrats, put on the defensive by communist gains in the late 1940s and early 1950s while a Democrat slept in the White House, adopting alarmist rhetoric was protection against relentless Republican attacks of “weakness” on national security issues. Playing down fears by either party would lead to accusations of insufficient “toughness” in confronting potential dangers—and even greater risks if one of those threats ended up being tragically realized. Adopting the position that America can never let down its guard became the safest and thus default political stance of both political parties—and a surefire way to build support for military action and/or increased defense spending.7

But this bipartisan practice is about more than just electoral politics. For any president intent on maintaining an internationalist foreign policy, it is essential to convince Americans that without the country’s web of security alliances, trade agreements, participation in multilateral arrangements, and vast power-projection capabilities, the U.S. homeland would be vulnerable to foreign aggression and influence. After all, a democratic country, surrounded by peaceful neighbors and two oceans, that devotes as much attention and money to national security as the United States does during peacetime is unnatural in the history of global affairs. Perhaps if Washington explicitly ran a global empire that regularly seized territory and plundered natural resources, it would be easier to explain. But American leaders are primarily focused on maintaining an international system that furthers the nation’s interests in ways that are often difficult to quantify.

While “maintaining the international system” might persuade policy wonks, for ordinary Americans this mantra does not quite have the same power. Suggesting that anything less than an active U.S. global presence will imperil their security is an easier lift. As the United States expanded its global role, the definition of its national interests expanded along with it—so much so that events in far-flung corners of the world that most Americans had never heard of were increasingly depicted to be as important to national security as protecting the homeland from attack. Whether or not one believes that it is essential for America to maintain an outsized international role, one thing is certain: without threat inflation, the case for American internationalism and a $600 billion military budget is that much harder to make.8

Other groups in what we call the Threat-Industrial Complex—from defense contractors and think tankers to military officials and the media—push an agenda of fearmongering, but the incessant exaggeration of foreign threats to America begins at the top, from the president to Congress and further down the spectrum of political power. Indeed, the entire infrastructure of America’s national security state—both inside and outside government—is geared toward overseas activism and maintaining a hair-trigger defense against potential threats.

Threat inflation in U.S. foreign policy discourse is not new, nor is it a post-World War II phenomenon.9 In 1898, the sinking of the USS Maine in Havana harbor, which was likely caused by an onboard coal fire, was employed as a pretext by President William McKinley—and a frenzied print media—for the Spanish-American War. “Remember the Maine, to Hell with Spain!” was the national rallying cry.¹⁰ Yet foreign-threat inflation since World War II has been vastly more consequential, due to the global scope of U.S. interests. That every president since has willingly embraced it is evidence of how routine and politically effective it can be.

Truman and the Early Cold War

Truman’s speech to Congress in 1947 recast U.S. foreign policy as an ideological competition between communism and the West. But it did not directly presage the twilight struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union that unfurled over the next forty years. Truman had used fear-based arguments to build support for containing communism in Europe, but the United States still trod on the international stage with a relatively light peacetime footprint. A series of events in the summer and fall of 1949 and then a year later in the summer of 1950 changed the political stakes and pushed Truman in a more militarized direction.

First came the Soviet Union’s first-ever nuclear weapons test in August 1949. The nationalist government in China fell to communist rebels weeks later. The former event raised the specter of a potentially existential threat to the U.S. homeland; the latter suggested that the United States was increasingly on the defensive in the face of communist gains. At home, those who were close to the Chinese nationalist leadership excoriated Democrats for being the party responsible for “losing China” to the Reds.

But it was the Soviet-backed North Korean soldiers streaming across the thirty-eighth parallel into South Korea in the summer of 1950 that served as the final straw. Even though Korea fell outside the original focus of U.S. containment policy—the European theater—Truman quickly decided on a military response and dispatched U.S. troops to the Korean peninsula. In the wake of the “who lost China” debate and the Soviet Union’s detonation of the bomb on his watch, Truman understood the huge political risks of appearing flat-footed in the face of clear communist provocation.11 “Free nations have learned the fateful lesson of the 1930s,” he told the American people in a radio address on July 19, 1950. “That lesson is that aggression must be met firmly. Appeasement leads only to further aggression and ultimately to war.”¹²

Three years after sounding the alarm about the fate of western Europe, Truman warned that events in Asia could also have a ripple effect on U.S. interests elsewhere. “The fact that communist forces have invaded Korea is a warning that there may be similar acts of aggression in other parts of the world,” he said. “The free nations must be on their guard, more than ever before, against this kind of sneak attack. It is obvious that we must increase our military strength and preparedness immediately. We know that the cost of freedom is high. But we are determined to preserve our freedom—no matter what the cost.”¹³ Truman called for higher taxes, steps to “prevent inflation,” and an “increase [in] the production of goods needed for national defense.” He told the American people, “We must plan to enlarge our defense production, not just for the immediate future but for the next several years.” From 1950 to 1953, military spending nearly tripled, from 5 percent of GDP to 14.2 percent.¹⁴

By portraying any communist gains as direct threats to the United States, Truman made it more difficult for him or any other president to resist the urge to respond to future Soviet or communist provocations. If “totalitarian regimes . . . undermine the foundations of international peace, and hence the security of the United States,” as he said at the time, how could the United States justify anything less than a strong response to communist aggression?

Truman’s choice to defend South Korea was defensible, but it was his next decision that proved disastrous—allowing the U.S. commander in Korea, Douglas MacArthur, to take U.S. troops across the previous border between North and South Korea in an effort to destroy the North Korean army and unify the peninsula. This action, which brought U.S. troops up to the Yalu River, sparked a Chinese counteroffensive that ensured the war dragged on for nearly three more years at a loss of more than thirty-six thousand American lives and an estimated two and a half million Koreans. Truman’s support for MacArthur’s dangerous offensive had been informed less by a desire to unify Koreans and more by the political fear that to settle for partial victory in the Korean peninsula would open him up to charges of weakness in fighting communism. As was so often the case during the Cold War, raising the specter of international threats had a boomerang effect.

Yet Truman’s tough stance on Korea did him and the Democrats little good. During midterm congressional elections in 1950, Republicans branded them “appeasers” and “soft on communism.” In California, Rep. Richard Nixon famously labeled his opponent in the state’s Senate race, Helen Gahagan Douglas, the “Pink Lady”—all the way down to her “pink underwear.” She lost by nearly twenty points on Election Day. Across the country, prominent Democrats, including the Senate majority leader Scott Lucas and others in Utah, Maryland, and Washington, also were turned out of office.

Truman was not untouched by the fallout from Korea. His presidency was so discredited that by 1952 he had little political choice but not to seek reelection. The eventual Democratic nominee that year, Adlai Stevenson, was swamped by his opponent, Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, who had pledged to go to Korea and end the war. The lesson that should have been taken from Korea was that fighting an endless war with high American casualties would spark a political backlash. The conclusion drawn by Democrats was the opposite: only vigilance against the Soviet threat could protect them from Republican charges of being soft on “communism.”

That mind-set received a boost from Wisconsin’s junior senator, Joseph McCarthy. In February 1950, he famously declared in Wheeling, West Virginia, that the State Department was “infested with communists” and that he even had a list of these “card-carrying” members. The McCarthy-led witch hunts of the early 1950s had a profound and lasting political effect. Seemingly no charge made by McCarthy and his Republican allies failed to be given prominence by an increasingly rabid, anticommunist news media. It hardly mattered that the United States enjoyed an enormous military advantage against the Soviet Union or that communist “infiltration” in the United States—insofar as it existed—was the furthest thing from an existential threat to America. Both Democrats and Republicans came to learn that no political benefit could be gained from playing down the Red threat or, even worse, appearing soft on communism.

Other factors also played an increasingly critical role. As Fredrik Logevall and Craig Campbell note in their seminal Cold War history, America’s Cold War: The Politics of Insecurity, a bipartisan infrastructure developed, with one clear goal—to sustain a national consensus of tough-minded anticommunism. “Many more powerful interests stood to benefit from a vigorous prosecution of the Cold War and from increased military spending—the armed forces themselves, civilian officials associated with defense issues, arms industrialists, labor unions associated with weapons industries, universities and businesses that benefited from military research. Few organizations—at least few powerful ones—had reason to fight such a rise.”15

Rather than fight this new consensus, the political incentives swung in a different direction.

Eisenhower and Missile Gaps

In the fall of 1957, an internal review of U.S. nuclear weapons policy gave Democrats the chance to turn the tables on Republicans. The Gaither Report, as it became known, claimed that U.S. civil defenses were wholly unprepared for nuclear war and that the Soviet Union was gaining a wide advantage over the United States in nuclear missiles and warheads.¹⁶ By December 1957, the “secret” report, egged on by leaked comments from intelligence analysts, particularly Air Force officials looking to increase congressional attention for their budget, sparked a public debate about the Soviets’ apparent advantage and put Republicans on the defensive.¹⁷

The Eisenhower administration was pilloried—and not just by Democrats—as Republican hawks went after the president as well. There was one problem: the data were completely wrong. There was no missile gap. During the 1960 presidential campaign, the CIA estimated that the Soviets had 90 intercontinental ballistic missiles, while the United States had 108, with 30 more being deployed to Turkey. Later estimates concluded that the actual number of Soviet missiles was three.¹⁸

The entire episode, however, provided a rich irony. Eisenhower had focused throughout his presidency on increasing America’s nuclear capabilities and, in turn, cutting spending on conventional forces. In his view, a buildup of tactical nuclear weapons and strategic bombers would be enough to deter superpower conflict and fulfill his goal of keeping government spending in check. Now he was being lambasted for allegedly leaving the United States vulnerable to nuclear attack. Eisenhower, however, was not blameless. In 1953, he had initiated a public relations effort of speeches and public service announcements ironically known as “Project Candor,” which aimed to scare Americans into recognizing the dangers of a Soviet nuclear attack in order to make them more supportive of his nuke buildup.19

Sen. John F. Kennedy, the Democratic nominee for president in 1960, took the purported missile gap and ran with it. He argued that Eisenhower and Vice President Richard Nixon—Kennedy’s opponent—had left America vulnerable. He called for increased defense spending and new vigilance in confronting the Soviets. It was an effective message, and it would not be left on the campaign trail. Kennedy famously declared in his inaugural address that America must be willing to “pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty.”²⁰

Kennedy’s tough talk had a profound impact on national security policy. After he took office—and the CIA informed him conclusively that no missile gap actually existed—Kennedy could hardly argue against funding for ultimately unnecessary long-range nuclear missiles. By December 1961, White House officials believed that 450 additional strategic missiles would be needed but recommended that the president ask Congress for 600. Secretary of defense Robert McNamara agreed but argued that the White House should actually request 950, because it was “the smallest number he could imagine asking Congress for and, in his words, ‘not get murdered.’ ”²¹ McNamara eventually asked, and Congress authorized, 1,000 strategic missiles.

By 1967, McNamara publicly acknowledged that the size of the force was excessive, stating, “current numerical superiority over the Soviet Union in reliable, accurate and effective warheads is both greater than we had originally planned and in fact more than we require.” Yet that same year, the number of strategic-delivery nuclear vehicles in the U.S. arsenal peaked at 2,268.22 Fearmongering on the missile gap helped get Kennedy elected, but America was ultimately stuck with the price tag.

LBJ and the Vietnam Escalation

At the same time that Kennedy and Congress were vastly increasing spending on unnecessary nuclear weapons that made Americans no safer, his administration was facing a far-bigger set of questions about Vietnam. Kennedy’s tough anticommunist rhetoric during the campaign and in his inaugural address placed him in a difficult political spot. He could either escalate U.S. involvement in Vietnam or face the political repercussions of allowing South Vietnam to fall to the communists. Tragically, he did not live long enough to decide. To the nation’s great loss, Kennedy’s assassination on November 22, 1963, brought Lyndon Baines Johnson to the Oval Office—a man for whom the political aspects of anticommunism came to define his decision-making on Vietnam.

Having seen firsthand the political backlash over the “who lost China” debate as a Senate leader, Johnson was convinced that if he “lost” in Vietnam—and it fell to the communists—the political catastrophe would doom his ambitious Great Society agenda. At no point did Johnson seriously consider leveling with the American people about Vietnam and making the case that a communist takeover there would not seriously threaten the United States. Nor did he consider the possibility that he could withstand the political firestorm that would come from failing to man the barricades in Southeast Asia. Convinced that he had little political choice but to escalate in Vietnam, he fell back on fearmongering as the best tool for making the case to the American people.

Less than a year after taking to the campaign trail and confidently telling the American people that “American boys would not be sent 8,000 miles away to do what Asian boys should be doing for themselves,” Johnson announced in July 1965 that he would be sending fifty thousand combat troops to Vietnam. “Why must young Americans, born into a land exultant with hope and with golden promise, toil and suffer and sometimes die in such a remote and distant place?” he asked Americans at a hastily convened midday press conference.23 “The answer, like the war itself, is not an easy one,” said Johnson, but in what would be a familiar refrain in the Cold War years, he reminded Americans of the supposed “lesson” from World War II: “retreat does not bring safety and weakness does not bring peace.” According to the president, “We learned from Hitler at Munich that success only feeds the appetite of aggression. The battle would be renewed in one country and then another country, bringing with it perhaps even larger and crueler conflict.”²⁴

Johnson warned that the communists’ goal in Vietnam, like Hitler’s goal in Europe, was not just to conquer South Vietnam but “to defeat American power, and to extend the Asiatic dominion of Communism.” If America restrained its commitment to the war, “then no nation can ever again have the same confidence in American promise, or in American protection. In each land the forces of independence would be considerably weakened,” Johnson said. And it was not just the Far East at risk, as “an Asia so threatened by Communist domination would certainly imperil the security of the United States itself.”²⁵ Johnson continued to employ this rhetoric throughout the conflict, claiming in February 1966 that stopping the Communists in South Vietnam was vital, because if they were allowed to win there, it would “become easier and more appetizing for them to take over other countries in other parts of the world.”26 Johnson’s warning was dire: “We will have to fight again someplace else—at what cost no one knows.”²⁷

In the fall of 1967, as support for Johnson’s Vietnam policy declined, the president stuck to his guns. In a speech in his home state of Texas, he tied North Vietnamese aggression to the peace and security of the United States and “the entire world of which we in America are a very vital part.”²⁸ He borrowed the words of Eisenhower and Kennedy and statements from Asian leaders on the risks of communist victory in Vietnam (though he failed to mention that many of these leaders were rejecting U.S. entreaties to send more troops to the war effort). He admitted that he could not be sure “that a Southeast Asia dominated by Communist power would bring a third world war much closer to terrible reality,” but he had his suspicions. “All that we have learned in this tragic century,” he said, “strongly suggests to me that it would be so.” He made his case that the risks of not continuing the fight were simply too grave to tolerate: “As President of the United States, I am not prepared to gamble. . . . I am not prepared to risk the security—indeed, the survival—of this American Nation on mere hope and wishful thinking. I am convinced that by seeing this struggle through now, we are greatly reducing the chances of a much larger war—perhaps a nuclear war. I would rather stand in Vietnam, in our time, and by meeting this danger now, and facing up to it, thereby reduce the danger for our children and for our grandchildren.”²⁹ Thirty-five years later, President George W. Bush used eerily similar language in making the case for preemptive war against Iraq: “We cannot defend America and our friends by hoping for the best,” he told graduating cadets at the U.S. military academy at West Point. “If we wait for threats to fully materialize, we will have waited too long.”³⁰

In both conflicts, the costs of direct military action would outweigh the price of inaction. By the time the U.S. war in Vietnam ended, 58,220 U.S. service members had given their lives.31 Estimates of Southeast Asian fatalities—Vietnamese, Cambodian, and Laotian combatants and civilians—range from 3.1 to 4.8 million.³² Casualties from U.S. munitions and in particular cluster bombs that remained after troops departed have taken another 220,000 lives in the years since the war ended. Potentially millions more bear the scars from defoliants like Agent Orange used by the U.S military during the conflict.³³

The 2.8 million tons of bombs that the United States dropped on neighboring Cambodia—more than the United States dropped during World War II—helped to grow the Khmer Rouge movement, which eventually took power in 1975 and initiated a genocide that killed more than two million Cambodians in less than four years.³⁴ But perhaps the cruelest irony of two decades of U.S. involvement in the region is that Cambodia was the only other Far East country to be ruled by communists after the fall of South Vietnam. The oft-stated threat of a domino effect in Asia—and the increased potential for global conflict and imperiled U.S. security—simply never materialized.

Nixon and the Temporary Détente

While the Vietnam War represented a moral and political disaster for the United States, one unseen benefit emerged from the conflict: a tamping down of Cold War rhetoric. President Richard Nixon, who succeeded Johnson in 1969, was an unlikely embodiment of this tendency. Throughout his political career, Nixon was one of the loudest and most assertive public figures stirring up the fears of Americans toward foreign threats. As president, he moved in a different direction. He eased relations with the Soviet Union through the policy of détente and most famously, in 1972, traveled to China to reestablish relations with the world’s most populous communist state. Under Nixon, the United States began to step away from its all-encompassing global role of confronting communism everywhere (outside of the Soviet Union) and instead sought to share this burden with its allies.

Yet Nixon’s transformation into a fear assuager was incomplete. At home, he depicted antiwar protesters as a threat to domestic security and asked for the help of America’s “silent majority” in repelling them. Seeking a breakthrough in peace talks with the North Vietnamese, he publicly authorized the deployment of U.S. troops across the border into Cambodia in an effort to cut off supply lines to Vietcong insurgents in South Vietnam. In announcing the move, Nixon said he would not allow “the world’s most powerful nation” to act “like a pitiful, helpless giant.”35

Nixon only had to go so far in the direction of threat inflation, however. His earlier stridency about communist threats gave him the leeway to reach out to Moscow and Beijing without paying a significant political price at home. Indeed, Nixon planned his trip to China in February 1972 and a trip that same year to the Soviet Union to burnish his foreign policy bona fides in the run-up to the fall election. Ramping down the national security rhetoric—and reaching out to once sworn enemies—was a winning political strategy. It would have been impossible if not for Nixon’s two-decade career as one of America’s foremost red-baiters.³⁶

Nixon’s presidency was a brief, rare period of threat deflation in American history. Normalizing relations with communist China, while helping ensure Nixon’s reelection, fundamentally roiled Republican politics, particularly for his successor, Gerald Ford. Ford largely followed Nixon’s lead on détente during his two years in office, which included an arms-control treaty (SALT II) and the Helsinki Accords with the Soviet Union. But doing so produced harsh pushback from foreign policy hawks who demanded greater vigilance against the communist threat.

Under pressure from these strident voices—in and out of government—the director of central intelligence, George H. W. Bush, commissioned a so-called Team B review of Soviet military capabilities that bore striking similarities to the Gaither committee of 1957. The report, led by the Harvard University history professor Richard Pipes and staffed with anti-Soviet hard-liners, determined that the CIA had underestimated Soviet military strength. The Team B report claimed that CIA estimates were based on actual capabilities rather than likely intentions and that there was no chance the Soviets would change their motivations or behavior in the future. The results were leaked to multiple news outlets and, for more than a decade, served as talking points for proponents of an arms race with the Soviets. Of the Team B’s ten members, six later held senior positions in the Reagan administration, while another was a presidential campaign adviser.37

The hawks fundamentally undermined Ford’s efforts to continue Nixon’s moderate approach. “I never backed away from détente as a means for achieving a more stable relationship with our Communist adversaries,” Ford later noted, “but the situation that developed in connection with the presidential primaries and the fight at the convention made it necessary to deemphasize détente.”³⁸ That fight came directly from the former California governor Ronald Reagan, who launched a spirited challenge to Ford from his political right. Reagan accused Ford and Henry Kissinger (who had stayed on as secretary of state and had become a bête noire to conservatives) of turning the United States into a “number two . . . military power in a world where it is dangerous—if not fatal—to be second best.”³⁹

In the face of Reagan’s challenge, Ford’s aides urged the president to “posture himself as sufficiently hardline that no major candidate can run to the right of him on defense and foreign policy.”40 The president jettisoned his moderate vice president, Nelson Rockefeller, for the more hawkish and conservative Kansas senator Bob Dole. He shelved efforts for further arms-control agreements with the Soviets, moved away from a focus on détente, and talked more like a foreign policy hard-liner. He blasted Democrats for proposing billions of dollars in defense cuts, which he claimed would weaken the United States vis-à-vis the Soviet Union. His secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, warned that any further reduction in Pentagon spending would “inject greater instability into the world.”⁴¹

While Ford barely outlasted Reagan in the Republican primaries, he could not get past his Democratic challenger, Jimmy Carter. Regardless, the foreign policy battle lines had been drawn for the Republican Party. Nixon’s efforts to tone down the aggressive foreign policy rhetoric that had led to disaster in Vietnam did not survive long within the party.

The Carter Doctrine’s Lasting Legacy

Jimmy Carter, unlike his Democratic predecessors, showed little inclination to act like a foreign policy hawk. In a commencement speech at Notre Dame University in May 1977, he decried the “inordinate fear of communism” that had led the United States to “embrace any dictator who joined in our fear.”⁴² Carter sought to deemphasize superpower conflict by making human rights a core foreign policy concern—even if this meant upsetting relationships with America’s anti-Soviet allies. What made the issue so politically palatable for Carter is that it appealed to Democrats, who had opposed the Vietnam War, and was endorsed by Republicans, who saw human rights as a way to draw clear moral demarcations between the capitalist and communist worlds.

Unfortunately, Carter’s efforts were upended by the intricacies of both international and domestic politics. While troubled by the human rights record of Iran and its shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, Carter found it difficult to separate the United States from its primary ally in the Persian Gulf. In Nicaragua, he cut off support for the nation’s strongman, Anastasio Somoza, only to see him overthrown in 1979 and a communist government take power. Carter pushed forward with the Panama Canal Treaty, which would return the strategically and economically vital waterway to Panama in 1999. Conservatives narrowly failed to kill the agreement in the U.S. Senate, but the treaty’s passage further emboldened them to push back on Carter’s more conciliatory approach to foreign policy.

Carter was already on the defensive, and the seizure of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran in the fall of 1979—and a tough primary fight against Sen. Ted Kennedy followed by a likely reelection campaign against Reagan looming—placed Carter in a tough political spot. When the Soviet Union invaded its southern neighbor, Afghanistan, in December 1979, Carter used the opportunity to ratchet up Cold War tensions. He named the cross-border invasion “the most serious threat to peace since World War II” and called for substantial defense-spending increases over the next five years. Secretly he authorized arms transfers to mujahedin rebels fighting the Soviet invaders.43

But the Carter policy that was to have the most enduring and costly impact on U.S. foreign policy was captured weeks later in one paragraph of the 1980 State of the Union Address: “An attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America, and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force.”44 The “Carter Doctrine,” motivated by politics and fears that the Soviet Red Army, now ensconced in Afghanistan, would roll through post-revolution Iran and control its oil-rich Khuzestan Province, located on the Persian Gulf, mirrored Truman’s widening of U.S. security interests after the North Korean invasion of South Korea in 1950. In both cases, the presidential argument relied on the untested supposition that failing to broaden the way the U.S. defined its vital interests would put the country at risk.

Carter’s expansion of the U.S. defense umbrella had disastrous long-term consequences. The rhetorical pledge created an entire government bureaucracy—U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM)—and political incentives to retain a permanent U.S. military presence in the region. As Carter’s number-two Pentagon official, Robert Komer, declared at the time, “The viability of this military policy depends critically on our access to facilities in the area,” adding, “we do not seek permanent garrisons.”⁴⁵ Access to these ports, bases, and airstrips required the permission of Gulf states, all of which were led by autocratic regimes with poor human rights records. In exchange for this approval, these countries received billions of dollars in foreign aid, advanced weapons, and tacit acceptance of their dreadful human rights policies. Over time, jihadist terrorist groups would use U.S. support for Gulf leaders as an effective propaganda and recruitment tool for terrorists, including al-Qaeda.

The ever-enlarging American military footprint in the Middle East, ironically and tragically, placed U.S. soldiers at far greater risk: 241 Americans were killed in the Beirut attack in 1983 (detailed shortly), 37 on the USS Stark in 1987, 19 during the bombing of the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia in 1996, and 17 serving aboard the USS Cole in 2000. Of course, there are also the Gulf War in 1990 and the Iraq War from 2003 to 2011. There are also the billions of dollars spent enforcing no-fly zones in the years between. In all, more than 7,500 U.S. troops have died stabilizing the continuously unstable CENTCOM region since Carter’s sweeping declaration. Even though the United States has decreased its reliance on oil exports over the past decade (particularly from the Gulf), 55,000 U.S. troops and 43,000 military contractors remained stationed throughout the Middle East in 2018.46

Just as Truman’s description of the Soviet threat laid the foundation for intervention in Vietnam twenty years later, Carter’s elevation of the strategic vitality of the Persian Gulf set the stage for the Iraq War two decades later. Like Truman and Korea, Carter’s move brought him little political benefit. Ronald Reagan, who during the 1980 presidential campaign compared him to the former British prime minister Neville Chamberlain, crushed Carter in his bid for reelection. Carter’s efforts to outhawk the hawks failed spectacularly.⁴⁷

Reagan, Rollback, and the Evil Empire

When Ronald Reagan took the oath of office in 1981, détente appeared to be all but over. The harsh Cold War rhetoric of the 1950s and ’60s returned to American politics. Reagan, who had been a rabid anticommunist for most of his adult life, stayed that course as president. He regularly portrayed the Soviet Union and communism in general as a threat to U.S. national security. He famously labeled the country an “evil empire” and said the anticommunist fight was “a struggle between right and wrong and good and evil.” He warned that Americans who opposed his nuclear weapons expansion policies “would place the United States in a position of military and moral inferiority” to the Soviets.⁴⁸ Even though CIA estimates showed the Soviet economy in free fall and trailing far behind the United States and even as the Soviet Union’s population grew increasingly discontent, Reagan insisted that Soviet leaders sought “world conquest—world communizing” and a “one-world Communist state”—as if such goals were actually attainable.49

Reagan’s tough language bolstered one of his top legislative priorities: massively expanding the Pentagon’s budget. Military expenditures jumped by $200 billion, a 56 percent increase, from 1980 to 1985, as Congress agreed to Reagan’s request for more B-1 bombers, research and development money for stealth bombers, new cruise and intercontinental nuclear weapons, a six-hundred-ship “blue water” Navy, and increased monies for stockpile maintenance. It represented the biggest jump in peacetime military spending in American history.⁵⁰

While there was some evidence that Reagan and some of his advisers viewed this spending spree as a way to bankrupt the Soviet Union, the language from Reagan-administration officials left little ambiguity as to why it was needed: America’s national security was at stake.⁵¹ Throughout 1981, as Reagan mobilized public support and congressional approval for increased defense spending, he talked regularly of a “margin of safety” that had been eroded by the Carter administration. He asserted that this margin could only be restored with the “long-range buildup of our Armed Forces.”⁵² In his first State of the Union Address, he made clear that any “imbalance” in defense between the United States and the Soviet Union represented “a threat to our national security.”⁵³ In pushing for new strategic nuclear forces, he warned that a “window of vulnerability is opening, one that would jeopardize not just our hopes for serious productive arms negotiations, but our hopes for peace and freedom.”⁵⁴ As Reagan spoke, both countries had enough nuclear warheads to destroy each other many times over: 24,104 for the United States and 30,655 for the Soviets.⁵⁵ At the same time, Reagan proposed deploying new nuclear weapons in the territory of NATO allies to target the Soviet Union. The move sparked a furious backlash in Europe and bolstered the growing nuclear-freeze movement in the United States.56

Reagan’s focus on the potential for nuclear war—as well as heightened tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union—had a profound impact on Americans. In November 1983, ABC broadcast the infamous television movie The Day After, which depicted in horrifying detail the consequences of a U.S.-Soviet nuclear exchange. Watched by more than one hundred million Americans, it captured the fearful sentiments of many who imagined a Day After–type war in the not-too-distant future.⁵⁷ In response to a November 1985 poll, more than a quarter of Americans (26 percent) said that they thought nuclear war with the Soviet Union was likely “in the next few years.”⁵⁸

A year earlier, Reagan was caught on an open microphone joking about having signed legislation that “will outlaw Russia forever”: “We begin bombing in five minutes.”⁵⁹ Reagan’s push for the so-called Star Wars, or Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), missile-defense program suggested to many (particularly the Soviets) that the United States was thinking about ways to win a nuclear war. For the first time since the Cuban Missile Crisis, the potential for nuclear conflict seemed to be not so far-fetched—and it was a view held not just by ordinary Americans but also by noted international analysts.⁶⁰

Not content with simply building up America’s nuclear capabilities, Reagan enacted a policy known as “rollback,” which sought to “reverse the expansion of Soviet control and military presence around the world.”⁶¹ In 1983, he issued National Security Decision Directive 75, which called on America “to support effectively those Third World states that are willing to resist Soviet pressures or oppose Soviet initiatives hostile to the United States, or are special targets of Soviet policy.”62 This guidance effectively committed the country to a foreign policy of compelling a change in Soviet behavior, rather than simply deterring Moscow.

This strategic decision resulted in a host of harmful and harebrained military and covert operations. In 1982, Reagan, against the unanimous advice of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, authorized the deployment of U.S. troops to war-torn Lebanon. While the force was nominally part of a peacekeeping effort, the larger goal was to check Soviet influence in the now “vital” Middle East. The mission was seen as a limited one, and Reagan claimed that the American force would not engage in combat operations.⁶³ However, in October 1983, after the deaths of five Marines in three separate incidents, Reagan authorized the USS New Jersey to shell local militias as well as Syrian forces. Less than a week later, Hezbollah-linked militants (with ties to Syria) drove a truck bomb containing more than twenty thousand pounds of TNT into the Marine barracks at the Beirut International Airport, killing 220 Marines and 21 other service members. Not long after, U.S. troops withdrew from the embattled country.⁶⁴

Closer to home, Reagan made support for the Contras, pro-American rebels in Nicaragua fighting the Soviet-backed Sandinista regime, a key element of his foreign policy agenda. Adopting the threat-mongering rhetoric that he used to describe the Soviet Union, he publicly warned that their defeat “would mean consolidation of a privileged sanctuary for terrorists and subversives just two days’ driving time from Harlingen, Texas.”⁶⁵ In late 1983, Reagan authorized a CIA covert operation to mine three critical harbors in Nicaragua to prevent cotton exports and petroleum imports. Though the mining program was intended to merely “scare off” ships—amounting to what one of the planners referred to as “a loud fart”—the explosives ended up damaging ships flagged by the Soviet Union, Japan, and the Netherlands and ultimately backfired by pushing the Sandinista government closer into the Soviet orbit. After the mining, the Soviets replaced Mexico and Europe as the chief oil supplier to Nicaragua.66

When Congress passed legislation restricting U.S support for the Contras, Reagan’s National Security Council responded with innovative and illegal approaches to funding the group. In 1984, staffers created dummy companies to arrange for private contributions to be used to illegally purchase weapons for the rebels.⁶⁷ In 1985, they funneled the proceeds to the group from an ill-fated arms-for-hostages scheme with Iran.⁶⁸ The Iran-Contra scandal, which led to a joint congressional investigation, an independent prosecutor, and criminal convictions for several officials involved, dominated Reagan’s second term and tarnished his presidency.

While some administration decisions to confront communism were justified on moral and strategic grounds, such as support for mujahedin rebels in Afghanistan waging a bloody war against Soviet invaders (Reagan dubbed them “freedom fighters”), others were harder to defend.⁶⁹ In 1986, the Reagan administration refused to go along with sweeping economic sanctions against South Africa’s apartheid regime. Officials claimed that the South African government should not be weakened in the fight against the allegedly pro-Soviet African National Congress. It put the White House in the isolated position of supporting a regime that was condemned by nearly every other nation in the world. In response to federal inaction, twenty-six states and ninety cities went so far as to enact their own sanctions on South Africa.⁷⁰ In the fight for freedom and democracy, American policy makers put opposition to communism ahead of all else. Eventually Congress overrode Reagan’s veto of sanctions legislation, increasing international pressure on South Africa and ushering in the end of apartheid rule.

Yet, ironically given all Reagan’s alarmist talk, there were important and notable limits to his hawkish tone. He only once used U.S. ground troops to intervene militarily—the 1983 invasion of Grenada. In the early 1980s—just a few years after the end of the Vietnam War—domestic political support for military interventions was in short supply.71

Reagan’s second-term foreign policy, surprisingly, would be defined by a ratcheting down of his early pledges to roll back communist influence globally and of the threats posed by the Soviet Union more generally. This was reflected in the more measured tone of the Reagan administration’s final National Security Strategy (NSS). While Reagan’s first NSS in 1982 had characterized the Soviet Union as a threat to “U.S. security” directly, by 1988 it had been downgraded to the less specific and less existential threat to U.S. “security interests.”⁷²

The NSS offered support to the economic and political reforms proposed by the new Soviet premier, Mikhail Gorbachev—a step opposed by many of Reagan’s more hawkish advisers. “While recognizing the competitive and predominantly adversarial character of our relationship,” the document read, “we shall maintain a dialogue with the Soviet Union in order to seize opportunities for more constructive relations.”⁷³ With the Cold War winding down, it seemed that the time had come to step away from the precipice and shelve the incessant threat inflation in Washington, DC, which had long been used to characterize superpower rivalry.

George H. W. Bush, Clinton, and “The Last Campaign of the Cold War”

While the international climate had dramatically changed by the end of Reagan’s presidency, the political benefits of fearmongering remained. In George H. W. Bush’s 1988 campaign for the White House, the vice president trotted out the traditional Republican playbook: “arousing fear about the future,” wrote the political journalist Sidney Blumenthal, who aptly described this race as “the last campaign of the Cold War.”74 Bush savaged his opponent, Michael Dukakis, for endorsing cuts to the defense budget and opposing “every new weapons system since the slingshot.”⁷⁵ He said that a win for the Democrats would return America “to the days when the military was as weak as they could be, when the morale was down, and when we were the laughing stock around the world.” According to Bush, the “jury [was] still out” on Gorbachev’s reforms, but one thing remained clear: “there is nothing [the Soviets] admire so much as strength, and there is nothing for which they have less respect than for weakness, military weakness.” In Bush’s attack ads, one phrase appeared prominently to characterize Dukakis: “America cannot afford that risk.”⁷⁶

As president, Bush utilized the same tone but against a different set of enemies. In December 1989, he sent more than twenty-five thousand U.S. troops into Panama to combat illegal drug trafficking. A year later, he assembled a broad international coalition to dislodge Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi forces from Kuwait. To build public support for the war, Bush inflated the threat posed by Hussein, in part by publicly describing him as another Adolf Hitler (or worse) more than ten times.⁷⁷ But while Bush’s mobilization efforts succeeded and America achieved its military objectives, the political benefits were muted. When the war ended, Bush had a 91 percent approval rating. Within a year, his numbers were well under 50 percent, and his opponent in the 1992 presidential election, Bill Clinton, even used Bush’s international expertise and focus on global affairs as a political weapon against him.⁷⁸ It was evidence, said Clinton, of Bush’s lack of attention to domestic issues. Bush became only the second president since Herbert Hoover in 1928 to lose reelection—and Clinton entered the presidency with little international experience and a skeletal foreign policy agenda. But in the first post–Cold War presidential election, Americans were far less focused on the world outside U.S. borders.

The challenge for policy makers in mobilizing Americans to continue caring about foreign policy was well captured in a February 1992 New York Times article that noted that, with the Cold War over and the Soviet Union vanquished, “Americans are facing not just the giddy spectacle of a grand, global political victory” but also “a quandary of historic dimensions, as disorienting as any this nation has ever faced.” Quoting John Mack, director of the Center of Psychological Studies in the Nuclear Age at Harvard University, the paper wondered, “How will the nation’s leaders cope when ‘they can’t find a reliable enemy to mobilize the nation any longer?’ ”79

Absent such an “enemy,” Clinton faced obstacles throughout his presidency in building domestic support for assertive international moves. In October 1993, the image of slain Army Rangers being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu hastened a quick military withdrawal from a peacekeeping mission in that beleaguered nation. Similar casualty aversion hamstrung U.S.-led efforts to resolve the Yugoslav civil war or to stop genocide in Rwanda. Indeed, even after al-Qaeda’s attacks on U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania killed hundreds, including twelve Americans, the bombing of the USS Cole, and plots to attack targets on U.S. soil were exposed, Clinton could not marshal public backing for aggressively taking on the still-shadowy terrorist group.

During the 2000 presidential campaign, Clinton’s Republican challenger, George W. Bush, called for a humble foreign policy and pledged to step back from the assertive U.S. international role of the Clinton years. If the 1990s had shown anything, it was that after the end of the Cold War, the lack of an obvious adversary made it increasingly difficult to rally Americans around an aggressive and costly peacetime global role. By the time Bush was inaugurated in January 2001, it seemed that, barring an unforeseen, emotive, and focusing event to organize domestic attention, America had perhaps begun to turn its back on the threat inflation that had defined U.S. foreign policy for the previous half century.